Although human pilots have hardly been replaced by computers yet, the bottom line is that the average pilot is infinitely more fragile than his fighter jet… and that can become a serious problem when you’re pulling enough Gs to pulverize a skeleton.

That’s just the consideration that has prompted the United States Air Force to announced that when the next generation of fighter planes debut, they expect all of them to be capable of remote piloting.

The Air Force calls these future fighter planes Next Generation Tactical Aircraft, or TACAIR. They’re years off, but Boeing, at least, will be making one.

What will these future TACAIRs look like? Very streamlined, with an appearance that is much more drone-like than current fighter planes. These new jets would feature advanced situational awareness and something called “net-centricity/”

The idea here is to not make airplanes that pilot themselves, but to take pilots out of the cockpits of fighter planes and allow them to do the dangerous missions from a reclining chair back at base. You know, gamer style.

Considering how hard and expensive a decent pilot is to replace and how many “impossible” maneuvers a jet pilot could pull off if he wasn’t actually strapped inside the mouth of the plane he was flying, we think the Air Force is on the right track.

Then again, though, I guess this could just be the first step towards Skynet.